St Mellitus Festival |
Augustinus ordinavit Mellitum quidem ad praedicandum provinciae Orientalium Saxonum, quorum metropolis Lundonia civitas est. So the Venerable Bede describes how in 604 a new Bishop of London, Mellitus, was consecrated to preach in the territories of the East Saxon Tribe whose capital was London.
I would have liked to witness the first encounter between the shaven crowned monks from Rome with the Euro-sceptic, mainly pagan, East Saxons. Mellitus and his companions were only in London thanks to the influence of the Christian King of Kent, Aethelbert who was uncle to the East Saxon King Saeberht. That King’s grave goods have only this year been rediscovered near Southend. We can once again see the small delicate gold foil crosses which denoted that Saeberht had been converted and was the first Christian King of the tribe.
The conversion did not go very deep however. Saeberht’s three sons did not follow their father to the font. It is said that they once saw Bishop Mellitus celebrate the eucharist perhaps on this very site. Barbara inflati stultitia, puffed up with barbarian fatuity they demanded the eucharistic bread. The bishop explained that baptism with its disciplines came first. The lads said that they did not need the aggro of the font but they wanted the bread. The bishop said that it didn’t work like that and they threw him out of the city.
Should Mellitus have been more sensitive in such a multi-cultural setting? What right had he to thrust Roman ways on Essex lads?
Then as now Christians were an irritant in pagan Europe, a pagan culture in which according to Edward Gibbon, the people believed that all religions were equally true and the philosophers believed that all religions were equally false.
It is not the Christian way however to winge about being cast out beyond the city walls. Jesus wept over the earthly city and there is, in the good news brought by Mellitus to this place, a word of warning.
The poet T.S.Eliot wrote a play for the Diocese of London in 1934 when we were trying to build churches in Middlesex to serve the new suburbs. In “The Rock” a stranger appears to ask the question,
……….“What is the meaning of this city? What will you answer?”
The city is a place where human beings congregate in order to flourish but how do we flourish as human beings? We flourish when we are free, when we enjoy our rights as free individuals and good news comes with the progressive elimination of anything that infringes our individual consumer choices whether in goods or morals. I think that Saeberht’s three sons would have understood. They wanted the bread but they did not want the disciplines of baptism.
The Christian faith comes with a deeper truth about human flourishing. Human beings are really unique and precious persons more than they are autonomous individuals. We grow as persons by relating to and serving other persons, in short we are made to love our neighbour. Spiritual beauty grows for each person to the extent to which we turn from a way of being in the world in which I seek to dominate It, to a way of being in which I love and am enriched by Thou.
We believe that this is the truth about the world which was created in this way by God the Holy Trinity, whom we worship without confounding the persons, they are unique and precious, or dividing the substance because we flourish together and are lost when we turn in upon ourselves.
Mellitus came with news of a new way of being in the world, a way of building the city of the living God whose foundation is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ invites us to true freedom and to human flourishing. He said I have come that they might have life and have it in all its fullness. Mellitus dared to go into the lion’s den because he had been entrusted like us with the story of how human beings flourish and it would have been unloving not to be a missionary.
The lads were suspicious however. They are prepared to take the bread but suspect that the new way is really going to infringe their freedom. We can be sympathetic. The story of the Church over the last 1400 years has not always been shaped by enthusiasm for human freedom. The church always needs to learn the lessons of the Spirit afresh. We should celebrate the passage from dependence to independence, which has been the experience of so many people in the Western world over the past two centuries. Our quarrel is not with the freedom from constraints, which has been achieved by passing from dependence to independence but that the process has stalled at this point. If human flourishing involves our growth as persons then independence must be offered as a gift as we grow in interdependence.
We are facing great dangers as a society. An excessive emphasis on the rights of individuals not only dissolves those institutions in which we learn and grow as persons but also paradoxically it entails a huge extension of state surveillance and regulation. Regulation is increasingly necessary as social bonds erode, to order the traffic and prevent collisions among autonomous individuals so sensitive about their rights that they have the tendency to crash into one another like so many billiard balls. The family unit, the oikos, which was once fundamental to the economy, [the two words have a common root] is now largely marginal. We lack any common language of moral decision making and as a result it is difficult to build the stable frameworks in which people can grow and flourish and communicate truth to the next generation.
At such a time, the church must be forever building the city of the living God. This entails initiating individuals into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Mellitus belonged to the community of St Benedict who established new forms of community in the ruins of the antique pagan world. We have a similar task in the neo pagan world.
The future lies with communities, which have re-discovered the structures and the faithfulness, which make for human flourishing. Some of them will emerge from existing parishes; some will be organised in networks. All need to be serious about communicating with one another through the common celebration of the liturgy, the public work which binds us together as a community, as members of Christ and through him participants in the life of the Holy Trinity. It is the liturgy in which Word and Spirit are present, which builds us into a church fit to be a sign of the Kingdom.
The prayer of thanksgiving transforms us from individuals with a right to use the earth for our pleasure into guests aware of our neighbour and conscious of the love of God whose goodness provides the bread we offer. This is the way we become a part of the story of Jesus Christ and see our story in his light.
It is commonly said of anniversaries now that we must not dwell on the past but look to the future. The teaching of history in school in such a climate becomes just the prelude to modern times with a special focus on Twiggy and the Vietnam War. By contrast, the story of Christ which reaches back to the Beginning of Time and the 1400 years in which his story has been heard in London, years in which church and the city have related in so many different ways; recalling this story gives us an openness to the possibilities of the future and a powerful sense of the choices which lie before us. What will our contribution to this story be? What will we answer when the Stranger says What is the meaning of this City?
